by Rex Miller
“Yeah, apolitical. I just fuckin’ bet.”
“I got a Romeo Foxtrot I’ll trade you, motherfucker.”
The team is tired. We drag ass with our own batteries low, loaded down with radio batteries and fighting to keep concentration up, to stay together, to keep hard for it.
We are moving through a huge field that has been taken off by a sustained arc-light (B-52) strike and it is like humping a lunar landscape. Giant craters pock the field and the one beyond like the dark side of the moon. The fields between here and the horizon look like they were taken off by big Rome plows. Payload city kitty. Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Huge pockets of loose earth.
You don’t want to be any-fucking-where near when those arc lights get down. I decide I will list my 691 favorite things about the Nam:
1. heat (blistering)
2. rain (constant)
3. mosquitoes (insane)
4. lifers (also insane)
5. flies (biting)
6. snakes (poisonous)
7. punji sticks (shitty)
8. dysentery (also shitty)
9. Malayan whips (smashing)
10. malaria (ass-kicking)
11. humping (endless)
12. rucks (punishing)
13. black syph (permanent)
There is the persistent rumor that is apparently for real about the so-called “black syph,” a strain of venereal disease so virulent, unrelenting, incurable, and deadly, that it generates an instant one-way ticket to Syph Island.
Syph Island exists. Too many people have heard about it. The grapevine has it that you go to this island where you are “sheep-dipped,” the current military jargon for having your records sanitized. You are then listed officially as KIA, or perhaps MIA in a few cases, and your family is so notified. You have ceased to exist.
Your body is on the island under lock and key until you eventually buy the farm. If this is some leper-colony bullshit story, it sure is a widespread one. Almost every military unit has heard first-generation rumors about somebody with a really “numbah ten thousand” case of VD that just upped and disappeared one day. Nobody ever heard from any of those cats again. Guess they all went to that big clinic in the sky.
Another one of the ball-busters is about the Americans fighting for the Cong. That is no lie, GI. Me, D’Allesandro, and Dutchman, all know a dude went over. White motherfucker too. He just boogied out one time on a patrol. So far as we know, he’s still working for the other side right now. Probably married Jane Fonda or some shit. Sharp mother too, just went batshit.
He’s carried on the books KIA, but we all know better. That cocksuck is alive and goddamn VC. Up here in Eye-Corps somewhere probably, lighting up Marines and shit, I wouldn’t be surprised. Crazy asshole.
It wouldn’t be hard to go over. There’s all kinds of routes. In Saigon we know a place where you can go and drink with VC on R&R, and that’s no shit. Place is fucking notorious. Some of them hate their officers just like we do. Some are hard-core lifer types. All kinds of VC. But the thing is, almost every one of them is real strongly motivated. To them this sonofabitch is a holy war. And the few I’ve talked to, I can promise you those slopes never doubt they’re gonna kick our asses out. I’ll say one thing for ’em, they’ve got balls to the walls.
Right next door to where the hard-cores go is this sales outlet for special weapons. If you know somebody, you can go get a rifled Zippo, a cigarette lighter that literally will light you up, a pen gun that fires a .22 round, all kinds of neat shit like that — and it’s run by the VC. Everybody in-country knows about it. The question I always wonder is, how do they stay open? I don’t like to think about the answer to that one.
Dig it. We are cacked out in some weeds, trying to figure a way to dump some batteries and ammo. Nobody has seen our drag man for two days and somebody says, look — and over across the field there’s old HOG, real as death and four times as ugly, waiting for us on the other side of the field. Got that look on his face like he just got done choking his chicken. Go figger it.
I’m running scraps of cloth patch through Sweet Alice’s mouth, ramrodding out little shitclogs of oily black residue. Scratching bites, swigging from canteens, popping bennies and Dexis, checking out a boil on the back of one of my ankles, fascinating shit like that. I’m also higher than eagle kaka.
I am doing lots more speed than I used to, so it’s lucky that I don’t give a clustered rat fuck. I can take a hit off my canteen and I’m higher than a bat right from the git-go. Then, pretty soon, I have to do some more or I get jumpy and tired. Speed picks my raggedy ass right up, man. I’m sorry, but there it is. It sits on my chest a little, sure, but I can handle that. I’m flying right now. How do you think I get through this ass-kicking green motherfucker — prayer?
“I keep wishing I were somewhere else . . . walking down a brand-new street — ”
“Awwwriight, let’s go, goddammit, girls! Saddle up!”
“Mmmmmnnnn.” Who died and made his ass king?
Diddybopping through some snaky weeds and on the edge of another desolate ghost town of blown hootches. We stop while El Tee looks at his maps, trying to figure out where the hell we are. He’s talking to somebody on his radio. Corns is talking on his radio. I wonder if they could be talking to each other. I fucking couldn’t care less who they’re talking to as long as we can get this daisy chain over with.
Into this wiped-out ghost town. I mean, the sensors are really out. This fucker is one big fighting hole. It is completely trenched. There is a spider hole or an overgrown bunker or a trench running every place you look.
Hold it. White has got his booby-trap sign going. He’s grabbing ass and pounding tit. Booby traps.
We lay chilly. White is duck-walking back toward us and he whispers to El Tee, “Move on back a few meters — move on back. Traps.”
El Tee signals us to move it back five to ten meters. White goes back up and pokes around. He is moving very carefully, alert to traps, snipers, and Charlie in his hidey hole somewhere watching. He eases back to our position in a couple of minutes.
“I make out at least a dozen trenches and shit just from here. I see hidey holes everywhere. I just took out a couple of traps and marked them right there,” he motions, “and there’s gotta be lots more.”
Half a day later we’re still down on our hands and knees with K-Bars working on it. Here’s what we find in Ghost City: in three hours we’ve uncovered eighteen hidey holes, twenty-five trenches, four grenade traps (two of which won’t blow), a very nasty trio of “whips” (bamboo devices), fourteen punji-stick pits, two claymores, and a small tunnel with what I hoped was going to be the front door of KILL, but what turned out to be a sack of grenades and some documents, which Tex says are some worthless, obsolete order of battle bullshit. All of this shit is overgrown and takes forever to clear.
“Fire in the hole.”
Crrrrooooomp! Crompppp! Crrrrrooooooommmmmpp!
“Shit sakes!” screams Ewell, “whyncha throw a fuckin’ few more frags in there! Waste a few more grenades, fer chrissakes. Jesus! Ya girls threw enough frags in there to kill a fuckin’ platoon, goddammit! That’s enough already, shit!”
“Hey, Top,” D’Allesandro asks innocently, “should we throw some more grenades in there, do you think?”
“Wiseass motherfucker. Come on, let’s get it done!”
Laughter. As we are all relaxing for a second, having a few grins with the ole Sarge, there’s a humongous explosion at the other end of the ghost town.
Steel flying through the air in this big, exploding wave of shrapnel, red dust, and stinging rock, cutting, smashing, blinding, bigass deafening noise out of nowhere and a horrible yell.
“Aaaaahhhahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Everybody’s going nuts trying to find out what hit the fan. Who’s hurt.
&nb
sp; El Tee is hollering, “Doc! Up from! Get a gun up on that knoll! Somebody get a fire team over there.” He’s hollering, we’re running around grabbing ass, running through the weeds.
“Aaaaaaaaaaa.” That awful moaning yell again.
El Tee screams, “Where the fuck is doc? Doc!”
It is Doc McAllen. He’s sitting in a really large puddle of blood and Jeezus H. Christ he is a fucking goner. Half of him’s blown away. I drop down and grab all kinds of bandages and battle dressings out of his bag, and me and Dutchman try to tie some of him off. Man, it is just hopeless.
Blood is everywhere, soaking the ground. He even has blood all over his glasses, and he is sitting sort of on what is left of his torso holding himself up with his hands, I guess, and moaning in a kind of long, tortured yell.
He pitches over backward in the blood and bones and stuff. Dutchman and I can’t do anything. Blood has poured out of him like a faucet. There is nothing to tie into, just slippery, blood-soaked, torn, meaty shreds. McAllen isn’t moving.
We’re a mess. Our hands look like the stockyards at noon Friday. We’ve got blood expander, battle dressings, bandages, all kinds of crap around. We’ve hit him with morphine. Shit, he is gonski. Doc is all fucked up.
I never could understand how he stayed conscious so long. Everything below the groin is gone; balls, dick, pelvis bones, thighs, knees, calves, ankle bones connected to de foot bone, dem bones dem bones dem dry bones, I am just on the borderline of losing it.
One of his boots is lying off to the side of the weeds, and the FO picks it up absentmindedly and sees one of Doc McAllen’s feet still in it, sheared off at the top of the boot like it was cut by a single guillotine slice. He tries to yell, but before he can he pukes all over himself. It just rushes up through him with a will of its own and he goes to barf city. People are crying, puking, holy shit, what a mess. I have never seen so much blood loss from anyone who was still alive. It looks like somebody took a couple of bathtubs full of bright red paint and dumped them on the ground. Dutchman and I are covered with all kinds of filth and blood.
Doc must have stepped on a bouncing Betty mine. What a way to buy it. I thought I’d seen some bad shit, but this is really something I could have done without. McAllen was a stand-up dude too. Fucking Vietnam.
We should all have a choice as to how and when we die. I want to go on the eve of my hundred-and-fifteenth birthday by being fucked to death in the arms of twin Polynesian hooker sisters who own a liquor store. And then I plan to go kicking, screaming, pleading, and whining.
Here are some of the 482 ways I do not — repeat, not — want to bite it:
138. Squashed by a fifty-foot python
139. Falling off the Empire State Building
140. Exsanguination by clinical vampires
141. Immolation at the hands of irate Buddhists
142. Disintegrating from interior rot
143. Drowning in a septic tank
144. Mutilation from berserk appliances
145. Being bored to death by politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc.
146. Internal combustion
147. Crushed by a falling Chinook
148. Suffocating in a woman wrestler’s armpit
149. Being flare-fucked in any orifice: some dudes down in the Delta had this sixteen-year-old prisoner; four of them give her some nummah one boom boom, then ram a pop flare up her and blow her up like a rotten sandbag
150. Having my pancreas removed through my nose
151. Stabbed in the eyes by marlin spikes
152. OD’ing on diuretics
153. Slicing in a premature autopsy
154. Decapitation by rotor blades (I saw a dude go that way!)
155. Being infuriated to death by officious morons
156. Swallowing Cokes with ground glass in them
157. Digesting a CIA “pep” (pulmonary embolism pill)
158. Sliding down a banister with razor blades in it
159. Stepping on a bouncing Betty mine and hearing a little noise when the detonator blows and knowing that before I can move one meter a 60-mm Viet Cong mortar round with a fast fuse is going to go off in the air about waist-high, turning everything south of my belt buckle into bright and slippery-red Hamburger Helper
El Tee is on the horn, trying to shout up an emergency medevac. Fucker’s yelling like a champ at some other lifer asshole down the line. Hate to tell ya, Loot, but no way, Jose. Doc is chewed.
Dutchman and I are trying to wipe all the blood and sticky stuff off our hands and arms. It’ll be a while before Doc McAllen’s death sinks in. For some reason I flash on the stew as I’m getting off the plane at Tan Son Nhut, bitch smiles one of those plastic grimaces and says, “Ve’ll see you again in a year. Meanwhile, haffa nice var!”
Bitch had more hair on her legs than I do. Haff a nice var. Outstanding. Goddamn krauts.
Chapter 20
“Marvel not at this:
for the hour is coming in which
all that are in the graves shall
hear his voice, and shall come forth: they that have done good,
unto the resurrection of life and they that
have done evil, unto the resurrection of
damnation.”
— John 5:28-29
“Jesus,” he half screams, wrenching himself awake.
“Oh, shit. Thank God,” he sighs, remembering the fragment of the dream, waking up drenched in sweat, really soaked and with a case of bad D.T.’s. He inhales all the oxygen he can suck into his aching lungs. He thinks, “Thank God for not letting me dream about him again” as he tries to shake the cobwebs loose.
It was only another of the snake dreams. He has snake dreams, too. Are they common in Nam? Has there been a snake dream survey? Does a desk jockey somewhere have the data? He has the snake dream often. It ain’t shit. But sometimes he flashes on in when he’s awake and that’s weird. Like the other day when he didn’t really see the snake, but he saw the S where it was slithering through the grass. Looked to be a real big mother. Some of the snakes over here can really book. Big Merle isn’t scared of snakes. It’s just that he remembers the one snake dream a lot.
He and his father used to go out in the fields snake hunting. There was a place where people tossed their junk, and the snakes liked to coil up under the stuff and keep cool on hot summer days. They could flip things over and take the snakes off with their clubs before the snakes could do shit. He liked going out with his dad on the snake hunts. Sometimes if it was a king or black or hog nose or chicken snake, he would take it and put it in his dad’s snake sack and they’d take it back to the house and turn it loose to catch field mice and rats. Snakes were OK.
First time his dad made him pick one up he was just a little kid, so he was a trifle scared of it, and he wasn’t going to do it, but his pop says no, son, it won’t hurt you. Now you go ahead and pick up that snake just like I showed you. And he picked it up and was real surprised. It wasn’t slimy or anything like he thought it would be. After that his pop had him handle snakes a lot, and it wasn’t long before he wasn’t scared of them at all.
Oh, that one time he’d started to kill that big copperhead that was curled up in the back of that old car and he’d been a little slow and it had come after him, he’d been scared then, but that was different.
The snake dream really wasn’t anything to speak of. One time when they were down in the woods where the backwater was, a pair of big old water mocs had come slithering across their path and his pop had sliced that big mama snake right in two with the double-bitted ax he was carrying, and a sac of little worm-size water moccasins came whishing out of that mama’s sliced-open belly, all writhing around in the stream of blood and pus, and that was what he saw when he had the snake dream, all those bloody little worms that would remind him of the boy.
As long as he did
n’t have to visualize the little boy in his mind, that was OK then. The snake dream wasn’t puppy shit. He tries to stretch out his arm and shoulder where he has slept all scrunched up. He can’t let himself think about the boy again. He knows the dream can turn him right around. He rubs his arm and wipes the dream sweat off his face as he watches two colored men jive-ass back and forth, wiping the sleep from his eyes as he watches the two men saying hello in their endlessly complex handshake, known by its acronym DAP — Dignity for Afro Peoples.
“Nuttin’ to it!”
“Jes’ do it!” An endless dap, over three minutes of fingers, hands, forearms, back fists, slaps, high and low fives, slap-dapping and chanting.
Damn jail sure has a lot of colored and Mexes in it, Big Merle thinks. Just about as many beaners as there are spades. He thinks how he got in here in the first place, which is just exactly what he does not want to be thinking about.
Just for a second before he can jerk his mind out of gear and put her into neutral, ChristohJesusoh nooooooo, he sees the boy again just for a second and feels the pain of it and sorrow and terror just as if it was yesterday before he can stop himself. Think about something, dammit! He tries to conjure up a thought about something else awful, some other thought that is strong and evil and bad enough he can get his teeth into the fucker and wrench his mind off the boy.
Think about that insane, no-good sonofabitch broke the little puppy’s paws just because it wouldn’t obey him, think about the bag lady he watched drown in her own vomit that time, think about the night they peeled that spic down in Oklahoma City, anything. Think about the dirt bike accidents, the time he rolled that stolen car, the circus geek lived down by the water works, time he fucked that sissy, think about anything.
There’s nothing to do about it now. God took the boy. Big Merle thinks about the one colored jailed with him. Old Tom used to say, “Country safe, motherfucker,” when he’d pass ya in the slams, and one time he said, “Tom, how come you always sayin’ country safe?” Just to have something to rap about.